Archive Blog From Knovel

Productivity for You and Efficiency for Us

Knovel introduced a new platform this week that revolutionizes our ability to add more Web 2.0 or interactive features and scale to meet our customer’s needs. Much of the original code base has been replaced moving from our original proprietary code (our VP of IT called it “spaghetti”) to completely open source, enterprise portal technology. Simplification of the Knovel architecture is allowing us to innovate and exploit faster development cycles to more rapidly prototype new product features. The most obvious user productivity gain is a lot fewer mouse clicks to manipulate data in our new Ajax based interactive tables. Here are just a few examples of the things Knovel users rely on interactive tables to find, compare, and calculate:

• Basic Physical Properties of Chemical Compounds - Try It
• Basic Physical Properties of Common Solvents- Try It
• Surface Tensions - Temperature Dependences- Try It
• Tensile Properties of Carbon Steel as a Function of Hardness- Try It
• Dielectric Constants of Common Materials- Try It
• Design and Mechanical Properties of Aerospace Alloys- Try It
• Creep Strain vs. Time- Try It

Join us for a free webinar. We'll walk you through upgrades and best practices.

Hence the new platform provides “efficiency for us” that immediately translates into “productivity for you.”

Thanks and have a productive day,

Chris Forbes
CEO
Knovel

Social Media's Coming of Age as Authoritative?

Following a revamping of Knovel’s platform earlier this year, we received a number of complaints from our customers saying, in effect, “Shame On You,” for making a change that linked our site’s Periodic Table of Elements to, of all places, Wikipedia.  Responding as a responsible Product Manager, I instructed our IT team to restore the links to the officially sanctioned, authoritative site, the Los Alamos National Lab (lanl.gov). 

Yesterday, at the Gilbane Conference, I listened to the keynote speaker, Michael Edson, Chief of Information Technology, at the Smithsonian Institution, evangelize for a “Smithsonian Commons,” where valuable resources can be released and made available for the use and benefit of everyone. He cited the example of a search on Google for SpaceShipOne, the first privately developed, successfully piloted space craft.  The Smithsonian has the actual ship in its Air and Space Museum, and there’s a blurb about it on their website; but if you Google SpaceShipOne, the Smithsonian’s ‘authoritative source’ isn’t even in the Top 10 results!  Guess which site is right up there near the top?  Wikipedia, with hyperlinks, video clips, the works! 

It got me thinking about my reaction to restore LANL as Knovel’s source for ‘authoritative’ information on the Periodic Table. Was I too hasty?  Consider the fact that Wikipedia has become just about the most accessed Internet destination for encyclopedic information, and its self-policing, self-regulating policies are well documented and followed by its myriad editors.  Verifiability is one of Wikipedia’s core content policies, and editors are encouraged to challenge any material deemed unreliable.   If these policies didn’t work, Wikipedia would have  disappeared long ago into the noise bin of the Internet, and would never have risen above long-standing, traditional resources like Britannica* and World Book. And have you ever noticed that the WIkipedia community's response to errors is virtually instantaneous, while on institutionalized sites, update cycles may be in days, weeks or even months?  Is it time to stop resisting the value of social media and start contributing to its success?

I caught up with Michael at a break, and asked him what he would have done in my situation.  He was intrigued, and replied, “Hmmm, I’d put them both up, and see which one my customers liked the best.”     Maybe we will. Meanwhile, what do you think?

Carbon at LANL: http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/6.html

Carbon at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon

 * a link to the Britannica site does appear in the External Links section of Wikipedia’s entry.

Diana Bittern
Director of Product Management

Building Upon Strengths - Enhancing Knovel's Interactive Tables

Knovel has built our business and our reputation around taking engineering reference data and making it more useful. 

In talking to customers, almost uniformly, the one thing about Knovel stands out most among our supporters is that they value the fact that we take engineering content and make it interactive.  It's one thing we do better than anyone else, and it allows our users to work smarter and work faster.  And to help engineers work smarter, faster and more productively is the reason why Knovel exists. 

So to further play to our strengths, and build upon what we do well,  I am happy to announce that Knovel has just introduced enhancements to our Interactive Tables.  These enhancements make it even easier for Knovel users to work with tabular information.  Not only are the tables easier to read, but they also support drag and drop functionally, so users can move columns around, hide rows and basically manipulate data. 

So please take a look at our user announcement , link through to a newly enhanced table and check them out.   And please let me know what you think of them.

Giving Back During the Holidays

With the holiday season upon us, many of us are planning to spend time with our loved ones, exchanging food, gifts and laughter.

The holidays are also a time to think of those less fortunate, those who are struggling  – and to do what we can to help.  While Knovel is a business, Knovel is comprised of people, and we are all a part of the communities where we live and work.

In effort to give back this holiday season, Knovel staff will be participating in local holiday drives.

San Antonio is the base of operations for a number of Knovel team members including our Information Services, group.  Our San Antonio staff are participating in Adopt-A-Family  - a program run by the Family Service Association (FSA) in San Antonio, Texas. Adopt-A-Family connects “sponsors” with families in need.  Sponsors provide holiday gifts for the participating families, to help bring the holiday spirit to their homes.  Many of the participating families live below the poverty line and struggle with the bare essentials – which means they could really use the help.

Having sponsored a family, Knovel staff will provide that family with necessities such as baby wipes, household cleaning supplies, and a infant “bouncer” as well as the usual wish list items such as bicycles, coloring books and Barbie dolls.

Colleagues in our New York City headquarters have chose to support Bergen’s Promise Holiday Gift Drive.  Bergen’s Promise is a local organization which assists children with complex behavioral and mental health challenges and their families.

We’re proud that we were able to mobilize the Knovel team to make a difference in our local communities – and it feels great.  Both of these charities do great work and they can always use the help.  So as you plan for the holiday season, perhaps you can consider ways you might make a difference by contributing to one of these organizations, or a worthy organization based in your community.

Happy holidays.

DiAnne Garza
Director, Program Management

Vertical

The first issue of PC Magazine back in the summer of 1981 was a thrill to read and it was sad news this week that Ziff Davis Media has decided to cease publishing the magazine. "The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn't there anymore," Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview. This was not unexpected as all of us know that the print media business has been in a ten-degree nose-down dive for a number of years now. The more significant aspect of PC Magazine has been the early and innovative focus on "vertical".

I got to know Bill Machrone in the early 1990's. Bill had been the founder and editor-in-chief of PC Magazine. I also had the pleasure of meeting Bill Ziff on a few occasions. Both "Bills" were early believers in "vertical". Ziff Davis had the approach of publishing magazines such as Car and Driver, Popular Electronics, PC Magazine, and Computer Shopper that entertained the "enthusiasts" -- people who cared a great deal about specific technologies and products -- not generalists but those who were passionate about a particular topic and wanted to go "deep". Today we would call such market segments "vertical".

You might say that much of the evolution of the web in the early years of the new millennium has focused on "horizontal" applications and content. Many millions of users swarm to sites that are a foot deep and miles wide -- Google search where you can find anything, eBay and Amazon where you can buy or sell anything, music and photo sites where you can enjoy any kind of media, and Facebook or MySpace where you can meet anyone. Enter Tony Tjan, CEO of Cue Ball Group, a venture and growth equity firm based in Boston.

Tony has put forth an interesting perspective in a posting at Harvard that the generation of the web now evolving will certainly be more "verticalized and editorialized". Tony says that current behavior will continue as we use use large, incumbent, generalist (horizontal) sites like Google and eBay, but at the same time, there will be a strong movement toward more specialized sites. He hypothesizes that this will allow a better balance between "authoritative, expert-endorsed content and broad, less bounded user-generated information". He adds that the advertisers will follow this trend as they sharpen their focus. See Tony's full story here.

One of the best examples of a truly vertical site I can think of is what has been developed by Knovel Corporation. When I entered engineering school more than forty years ago (is that possible?), I used a slide rule and engineering reference manuals. I think of them as the first of four generations of using engineering and scientific data. The second generation was web-based data with PC's for standalone and separate analysis. Knovel Corporation (pronounced nah-vil) introduced the third generation about five years ago -- "Knovelized" data with deep search and a high degree of interactivity. Knovel brings boring reference manuals to life and in the process saves engineers and scientists many hours of effort. It is a good example of an information service that is available "on demand". The fourth generation of Knovel's vertical site currently being launched includes Ajax-based interactive graphs built with Mathematica. With no software on the PC other than a standards-based browser, the new generation of tools allows the engineer and scientist to dive deep, find the most arcane of formulas and then interact with them deeply and graphically to solve a design challenge or fulfill a research project. For millions of engineers and scientists around the world, this will be the next generation of the web -- information and tools at their fingertips -- reliable, relevant, and fast.

Disclosure: Tony and I are both investors in Knovel Corporation and members of the board of directors.

Other references to Knovel on patrickWeb

Productivity – Do you value it and, if so, how? - Volume 1.0

We think a lot about productivity at Knovel because improving productivity for engineers is our value proposition. Every time we meet customers we ask this question and get myriad responses. Some customers have very well defined measures for productivity improvement and others will rely on visceral reactions in their decision making. What is clear is that every customer values improved productivity and most want to know of methods that will help to better define productivity and how it can be measured to support investment decisions.

As I mentioned we think a lot about how to improve productivity for our customers. Recently we conducted a series of quantitative and qualitative surveys to help us better understand how engineers and engineering managers think about productivity and how they value it. We have conducted studies in concert with the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), along with a series of interviews with customers and non-customers (the ones that got away). Stay tuned - over several posts we will lay out what we have learned. We welcome your reactions and questions.

Thanks,

Chris Forbes

Trust - The Lubricant for Success - Volume 1.0

Trust is a core value at Knovel and I intend to write about it with some frequency. In working with our team to build Knovel over the last 8 years I have come to understand the tremendous impact of building and loosing trust. It takes time to build and can be destroyed in the blink of an eye. Steven M. R. Covey has authored an excellent book called “The Speed of Trust” that I can unequivocally recommend to anyone that wants to understand the tremendous effects that both gaining and loosing trust can have on success. This is a book that I have read and re-read. If you are part of the Knovel family and would like a copy please let me (cforbes@knovel.com) know or please order it on-line.

I will be addressing our company this coming Monday morning on an issue that is on everyone’s mind. Every time I talk to our team it presents an opportunity to add or subtract from the “trust bank” I have with each member of the team. I will be speaking about how the economy may affect Knovel over the next 15 months and I am one of thousands of leaders that will attempt to reassure our teams in this uncertain time. I am certain many leaders, given the economic situation, are testing relationships for both good and bad outcomes: businesses are drawing credit lines because they fear their bankers will not honor commitments, customers are hesitating to tell vendors “the bad news” until the very last minute, and companies are not fully revealing the “truth” either because they are unsure or don’t much like what they see. Ultimately their leaders have responsibility for these choices and each presents an opportunity to effect the balance of "trust banks" with myriad stakeholders.

I could tell our team that there will be little impact and try to re-assure them that our business and its future growth is 100% secure. After all we have a business that is growing, has a sustainable competitive advantage, has customers that value our offering and is supported by consistent data (e.g., very high renewal rates…). The fact is that I have some knowledge of what will happen in the 4^th quarter of 2008 and little knowledge of what may happen in 2009. So I will advocate prudence through careful analysis of the available data, belt tightening and making sure that we listen closely to our customers. This means that investments will be held to current levels and we are considering scenarios that include no growth in 2009 to ensure that we remain well capitalized. This is hard to believe for a company that enjoys a 35% compound annual growth rate. Perhaps we will be proven wrong and current and potential customers will so highly value our service that our growth rate will be sustained. It is more likely that a falling tide will cause all boats to fall and we should be organized to accept this for the next several years.

I will share these scenarios with our team and ask them to give careful consideration to controlling costs, making wise investments, preparing for flat results, and extending trust to each Knovel team member to be careful and innovative in their choices.

Thanks for taking time to read these thoughts,

Chris Forbes

CEO

Knovel

“Time to Stash Your Cash – NOT!”

I read with dismay an article in today’s Wall Street Journal - “Time to Stash Your Cash” by Brett Arends. My initial reaction was to think it was satire. Sadly I think this is not the case. In a time of crisis anyone in a leadership role, such as Mr Arends, has an obligation to show people the way forward and not fan the fears of the crowd. He has not done so, rather he advocates cutting every possible personal expenditure. This is rubbish and a recipe to ensure that the United States goes into a deep recession. While we need to be prudent in our spending choices, we need to keep spending to drive the economy to maintain jobs and ultimately return to growth.

I am sure that many people who work for Knovel, our customers and our suppliers are wondering about their immediate job security and what the next months will bring. We are fortunate at Knovel to have a stable base of business that runs across many industries and much geography. While we will feel the effects of the current situation we are fortunate to have diversified revenue sources and good capitalization. This bodes well for us to weather a difficult time. It also presents us with a responsibility to re-double our efforts to maintain and grow our business for our employees, our customers (engineers, scientists, librarians…), and our suppliers (publishers, professional societies…). We will do this for all our stakeholders and I sincerely hope that each of them will take a similar approach and keep the World’s economic engine moving.

These are times that present substantial opportunities for growth. To illustrate Jack Welch at last week’s World Business Forum in New York suggested the following:

While he considers himself an optimist, the current economic news convinced him that we will see significant negative growth in Q4 and Q1 of next year (he is uncertain whether Q3 will be flat or down). He said this is what the companies in his private equity stable are doing to prepare for tough times and inaccessibility of capital:

-          Adjust your cost structure and de-leverage immediately

-         Take care of your top employees – in cases where the economy causes them to miss their numbers, put in place a new compensation pool to keep their pay reasonable and not risk losing them.

-         If you have access to capital, get ready to “bury or buy” your competition and consider using more generous credit terms to keep and gain customers during this period

I could not agree more and we have or will be taking every one of the steps Mr. Welch has advocated.

Thanks,

Chris Forbes

CEO - Knovel

Adding the E for Engineering

Kudos to Christina for this post on the difference between scientists and engineers.  I've always found her to be a voice which truly gets it.

When considering information needs, too often engineering disappears under the STM (Science Technology and Medicine) umbrella - so I'm really fond of the "E" she inserted for Engineering to form the acronym - STEM. 

Engineers have different goals. They're problem solvers and problem solvers need different tools. Trying to shoe horn their needs in with scientists just doesn't cut it. The information marketplace has long recognized the practical, problem solving nature of medical workers. And the size of the medical information market reflects that.

Each of us at Knovel come to work because we believe that more can be and needs to be done to support engineering workers with information and aligning that information with the way engineers work. We've a long way to go to catch up with medical markets - but we plan to make sure that engineers have similarly useful information resources to help them problem solve in their work.

So let's acknowledge that engineering deserves to be called out on its own and stick with "STEM."

Search from here, there or anywhere

Is there anything more important than being where your users are?

The web is a big place and different users search in different ways.  Among the ways people get to Knovel are by typing in www.knovel.com, clicking a link on their company intranet, linking through from a library catalogue, or searching on Google.

The key for a information provider like Knovel is to find ways to be visible where our users are.  We need to remind folks that they have better options for finding technical information.  It's a lot easier than it sounds.

Knovel has always offered our customers buttons and banners so they could link into us. Buttons and banners are promotional, but we've been looking for ways to be more, umm .... useful.   So, starting with simple, Knovel is trying something new.

We've created the html search bar you'll find below.  It's a nifty piece of code that can be pasted practically anywhere - homepages, intranets, blogs - and used to search Knovel for engineering and technical information.  I've even used it on the left side of the Knovel blog.

If placing Knovel search somewhere might help you, please feel free to take this code and use it.  Knovel also offers other versions of Knovel search banners.

Companies need to figure out ways to ensure our products are there, where users need them.  In the coming weeks and months, I hope to introduce other ways that Knovel can be easily put where our users will find us most useful.

 

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<style type="text/css">

       #KNOVEL_SEARCH_BANNER { border: 0; height: 110px; width: 180px; }
       * html #KNOVEL_SEARCH_BANNER { width: 180px; height: 110px; }

</style>
<iframe id="KNOVEL_SEARCH_BANNER"
src="http://www.info.knovel.com/SearchBanners/blogbanner2.html"
frameborder="0"></iframe>